Health and Healing

Strength In Unity at a Time of Fear

A gathering of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis last month featured a pair of unusual speakers: the leaders of Boston’s largest mosque.

Shaykh Yasir Fahmy told more than 50 rabbis about growing up in New Jersey and studying in Jordan and Egypt. He taught a celebrated religious text about the angel Jabril (Gabriel) and the Prophet Mohammed. Yusufi Vali, the mosque’s executive director, spoke about the anxiety many Muslims feel in the current political environment.

In many ways, it’s an uncommonly dark moment in American religious history, with frequent news of yet another bomb threat, cemetery desecration, shooting, or arson targeting Muslims or Jews. But the fear and uncertainty have sparked an intense period of relationship-building between the two faiths: In Boston and across the country, a winter of persecution has brought a new warmth and vitality to Muslim-Jewish relationships.